We had gotten our cat reanimated for some reason. And for some other reason, there was another smaller one who looked like him. The smaller one could jump really far and had black claws. I saw him jumping at me while I was in a chair, and it hurt, in a whimsical way, when I pushed him out of the air gently. We put Muppet Christmas Carol in the DVD player, even though it wasn't Christmas, because we hadn't watched it in a while. On the menu screen, some kind of 5-star rating system had been implemented, and the movie had gotten three stars from our family. There was a place on the screen you could go to see what each member of the family voted on it, although you couldn't see their names. We had been rotating between Muppet Christmas Carol, The Muppet Movie, and Great Muppet Caper as the family movie night movie for a while now, and I decided we were probably getting sick of it.
My mom told my sister that she should make sure never to put the two cats together, because they would misbehave. I envisioned a vertical Risk board of just South America, with one cat going to Chile and the other going to Guyana. Then the Risk board was on the table, with a vertical-length sink on the side of it. I thought to myself how much more convenient that was than that one odd version of the game with a horizontal board, where the sink had to go in front of it and you had to reach over the sink to get to it.
I started playing on that horizontal board, which covered the whole world, moving all three guys. There were a heck of a lot of territories, especially considering it was late at night and there was no way I was going to finish in time. To play, you rolled this one big pewter die. The sides on the die were a soldier, a horse, a cannon, a soldier with Poland over his head (Poland was supposed to represent any territory), and two more I can't recall. There were so many territories on the board that in Australia, most of them had abbreviated named like "e me" (for "east meridian") or just "S." (not sure; I would have had to look in the rulebook). I realized after a while that I hadn't actually been paying attention to the die rolls at all. But it really didn't matter, because I was just passing time until my mom got done putting my younger siblings to bed.
I saw one of the reanimated cats jumping at me and I freeze-framed and drew a yellow mustache on him in MS Paint. I also became Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Sixth Day, decrying the overuse of animal-resurrection techniques to shield children from death.
I was trying to get my mom to watch Space Mutiny (MST3K comment was mysteriously absent), but it was a very different movie. I gradually realized that I already knew that the whole thing was a thinly-veiled Take That against Reagan, made in 1984. In this odd version, the Santa Claus captain was a bad guy, part of the Republica party, a blatant reference that Tom Servo picked up on without even being there. There was a group of rebels called Demo-somethings, who wore all blue. A racial message was added, since Republicans are supposedly racist. Someone had a slave. He was black, and his name was Simon. He died in some bad way. A guy, apparently some kind of mayor (on the futuristic space ship), gave a speech, in a bit of a drawling Southern voice, about how Simon died an honorable death and we needed ten thousand more men like him. I remembered that the first time I watched this, I almost liked the mayor guy up until that line.
In the background, the new version of Grandma Daughter, who was now about 18 and actually looked like it, and was also kind of Marty McFly, was talking with her friends, and starting to question the idea of segregation. One of her friends was named Pam and had braces. She had some lines that I found rather amusing at the time. I thought to myself that it's always the characters that don't have to advance the plot who get to be the funniest. To prove this point to myself, I looked at a scene from Back to the Future where Marty was running across a runway. In a bit of an homage to that one part of the Lucky Star opening, everything would go black, then fade back in quickly, and there's be more people. One of the people on the runway was a fat guy in a flesh colored shirt. I pointed out his "bouncening bosoms" to anyone who was listening.
tl;dr: Cats came back to life as I, Arnold Schwarzenegger, was playing Risk and thinking about watching Space Mutiny, which was different.
